An inventive examination of a crucial but neglected aspect of architecture, by an architect writing to architects.
Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with indifference. The discipline of architecture values the image of the new over the lived-in, the photogenic empty and stark building over a messy and labored one. But the fact is: homes need to be cleaned and buildings and cities need to be maintained, and architecture no matter its form cannot escape from such realities. In Maintenance Architecture, Hilary Sample offers an inventive examination of the architectural significance of maintenance through a series of short texts and images about specific buildings, materials, and projects. Although architects have seldom choose to represent maintenance―imagining their work only from conception to realization―artists have long explored subjects of endurance and permanence in iconic architecture. Sample explores a range of art projects―by artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles―to recast the problem of maintenance for architecture. How might architectural design and discourse change as a building cycle expands to include “post-occupancy”?
Sample looks particularly at the private home, exhibition pavilion, and high-rise urban building, giving special attention to buildings constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and precise detailing in relation to endurance. These include Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House (1929), the Lever House (1952), the U.S. Steel Building (1971), and the O-14 (2010). She considers the iconography of skyscrapers; maintenance workforces, both public and private; labor-saving technology and devices; and contemporary architectural projects and preservation techniques that encompass the afterlife of buildings. A selection of artworks make the usually invisible aspects of maintenance visible, from Martha Rosler's Cleaning the Drapes to Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's The Kiss.

Maintenance Architecture (Mit Press)

Arts & Photography

Sample, Hilary

Architecture

The MIT Press

An inventive examination of a crucial but neglected aspect of architecture, by an architect writing to architects.Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with indifference. The discipline of architecture values the image of the new over the lived-in, the photogenic empty and stark building over a messy and labored one. But the fact is: homes need to be cleaned and buildings and cities need to be maintained, and architecture no matter its form cannot escape from such realities. In Maintenance Architecture, Hilary Sample offers an inventive examination of the architectural significance of maintenance through a series of short texts and images about specific buildings, materials, and projects. Although architects have seldom choose to represent maintenance―imagining their work only from conception to realization―artists have long explored subjects of endurance and permanence in iconic architecture. Sample explores a range of art projects―by artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles―to recast the problem of maintenance for architecture. How might architectural design and discourse change as a building cycle expands to include “post-occupancy”?Sample looks particularly at the private home, exhibition pavilion, and high-rise urban building, giving special attention to buildings constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and precise detailing in relation to endurance. These include Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House (1929), the Lever House (1952), the U.S. Steel Building (1971), and the O-14 (2010). She considers the iconography of skyscrapers; maintenance workforces, both public and private; labor-saving technology and devices; and contemporary architectural projects and preservation techniques that encompass the afterlife of buildings. A selection of artworks make the usually invisible aspects of maintenance visible, from Martha Rosler's Cleaning the Drapes to Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's The Kiss.

Maintenance Architecture

In less than a decade, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample have emerged as two of architecture's most daring experimenters. Their New York City-based studio MOS is home to an unusually eclectic band of collaborators for whom new media technologies offer not simply better means of presentation, but rather become the radical tools necessary to create groundbreaking architecture. By exchanging plans and sections for software and film, MOS eschews the static forms of traditional architecture in favor of a working technique that is inventive and playful. Everything All at Once showcases over twenty-five projects on screen and in built form, including the acclaimed thatch-covered structures from the 2009 PS1 After Party and the mylar weather balloon installation at the 2010 Venice Biennale. As aesthetically experimental as the projects it contains, Everything All at Once is a window on the architectural vanguard of today and a vision of the architectural studio of tomorrow.

Everything All at Once: The Software, Videos, and Architecture of MOS

Meredith, Michael

Princeton Architectural Press

Their work has been described as experimental and innovative, qualities front-and-center in their previous collection Everything All at Once. In just ten years, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample have established MOS as one of the leading young architecture practices in the country. Selected Works, the first monograph on the built work of the New York–based firm, follows the design studio's evolution from their earliest works to their most celebrated houses and institutional buildings. The thirty-two projects featured range from the sophisticated to the absurd—from the serene Floating House in Ontario, Canada, and the sustainable Kathmandu Orphanage in Nepal to the playful puppet theater at Harvard's Carpenter Center and the appropriately named Rainbow Vomit installation in New York, a digital, interactive, computational heap of building blocks in a constant state of near collapse. The collection also includes a selection of the couple's unorthodox writings, including their satirical "Office Policy" employee manual.

MOS: Selected Works

Individual Artists

A compendium of children’s design exercises by architects from around the world accompany illustrations and photographs documenting the construction of the Petite École pavilion.\nAs part of the 2019 Biennale d'architecture et de paysage in Versailles, France, MOS constructed Petite École, a small, open-air pavilion to house educational workshops for children. It is a place for looking and making, and for making and looking, constructed with 688 aluminum pieces modeled, flattened, cut, folded, prefabricated, shipped, and then assembled onsite. It is made to be taken down and reassembled elsewhere. It is designed to be easily understood, made of simple building elements: a long, low roof with columns and stacked beams holding it up.\nUndertaken during various design workshops, single page design exercises written by architects were assembled into a large book and given to children. A Book on Making a Petite École features an expanded collection of these exercises. Each exercise includes playful illustrations of its steps, starting a conversation about how designers look at, think about, teach, and imagine the foundations of design. Alongside these, the design process of the pavilion is included, as its own design exercise, from colorful illustrations of each step of the pavilion’s construction, to actual construction photographs and photographs of the completed pavilion being occupied.\nA Book on Making a Petite École considers basic questions of design pedagogy, abstraction, accessibility, experimentation, and equity, while considering and reconsidering architecture.

A Book on Making a Petite École

Children's Books

Arts, Music & Photography

Actar

Laboratorio de Vivienda

Vacant Spaces NY begins gathering the incomplete data available and documenting vacant spaces in New York City. Organized from large to small, general to specific, vacancy in the United States to case studies of specific vacancies in Manhattan, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, and their architecture studio MOS imagine possibilities for repurposing current vacant spaces in New York City.\nThis project began by walking around our neighborhood noticing empty storefronts. Once we saw them, they were everywhere. They followed us, appearing quietly throughout New York City. Many with no signage, no “for rent,” no “coming soon.” Usually empty, sometimes dusty, sometimes with brown paper covering the glass. Now, vacancy has only increased. In the densest city in the United States. During a housing crisis. Throughout a pandemic. The quantity of vacant spaces is anyone’s best guess. It’s only partially documented. They hide in plain sight.\nVacant Spaces NY is organized from large to small, general to specific. It begins by looking at vacancy within the United States and continues down to each Manhattan neighborhood, where we zoom into specific vacant spaces, where we have provided as case studies that imagine some possibilities for transforming current vacant spaces into housing or social services. There is also a section on Covid 19, which infiltrated New York during our research. As a whole, this document is not meant to provide specific solutions. The data is incomplete. Case studies are limited. We are not policy experts or data analysts or urban planners. Instead, it is simply meant to show something we have taken for granted, vacant spaces, taking part in a collective process of imagining a better city.

Vacant Spaces NY

The book entitled 'A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates', by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample from MOS Architects (NY) is currently exhibited in the US pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016. Cities structure our lives, resources, interactions, and identities. From Sebastiano Serlio to Rem Koolhaas, architects have used the metaphor of theater, presenting the city as stage, as comic sets for comic acts, as a delirious city for delirious subjects, generic city for generic subjects, and so on. Today, however, we are social anywhere, actors on- and offstage. So what happens when the city no longer structures us, or when basic urban elements - streets, buildings, facades, and addresses - have been augmented, superimposed, and untethered by or replaced through technology? 'A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates' is a playful investigation into urban alternatives. Employing neither the holistic worldview of mapping nor the isolated islands of architectural typology, MOS imagines a proposal where the city is everywhere... Includes essays by Jack Self, Co-Curator of the British Pavilion, 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale; T. Conrad Therrien, Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum; and Ana Milja&#269;ki, critic, curator, and Associate Professor of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

A MOS Architects: A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates (Research and Practice)

AADR

Journey with architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample through the history of architecture on their quest to find a perfect home In Houses for Sale, architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS Architects invite readers on their family's quest for a new home through the annals of architectural history, exploring details and peculiarities from some of the greatest names in architecture. When they realize that there isn't any one house that suits them perfectly, they decide to design their own. In doing so, Meredith and Sample come to the conclusion that no building is perfect and that architecture is an exciting, ever-evolving project in which the process of bringing a new building to life through design and construction can be even more satisfying than the final product itself.Published in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Houses for Sale is a charming and thoughtful introduction to architecture's varied history, with full-color illustrations and simple text that are suitable for aspiring young designers and experienced architects alike.

Houses for Sale

Graphic Design

Corraini Edizioni, CCA

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